Girl's book demystifies dyslexia

Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune

Samantha Armstrong, an 8th-grader at St. John School in Encinitas, is one of 10 Catholic school students in the U.S. to earn the 2017 Youth Virtues, Valor and Vision Award for her children's book about coping with dyslexia, "Brain Town."

Samantha Armstrong, an 8th-grader at St. John School in Encinitas, is one of 10 Catholic school students in the U.S. to earn the 2017 Youth Virtues, Valor and Vision Award for her children's book about coping with dyslexia, "Brain Town." (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune)

Most people with dyslexia describe it as a learning disorder. Not Samantha Armstrong.

The Encinitas eighth-grader sees her dyslexia as a gift from God that has allowed her to harness brain strength, focus and confidence she never knew she had. This spring, she’ll publish a book for grade-schoolers with dyslexia offering her experiences and advice for how to cope with and appreciate their own “gift.” She calls her book “Brain Town.”

Samantha’s faith, positive attitude and desire to help others led to her being chosen last month as one of just 10 Catholic school students in America for the 2017 Youth Virtues, Valor and Vision Award by the National Catholic Educational Association.

The bubbly teen said learning about the award in January was a huge and wonderful surprise.

“I think it’s awesome,” said Samantha, who is the student body president at Saint John School in Encinitas. “Being a leader is super fun.”

Samantha Armstrong, an 8th-grader at St. John School has been chosen as one of 10 Catholic school students in The United States for the 2017 Youth Virtues, Valor and Vision Award by the National Catholic Educational Association for the book, "Brain Town," the first in a series she is creating to help children like herself with dyslexia navigate the challenges of school.

(Howard Lipin)

At 13, Samantha is the youngest by three years of the 10 recipients, who were chosen from a field of 1.9 million students. The NCEA said it selected the winners based on their “selfless service, determination, innovation and ideals that are changing the world.” On March 8, Samantha will be honored in a medal ceremony at Saint John, which she has attended since preschool.

She was nominated for the award by Saint John faculty member Teresa Roberts, who teaches Samantha in her 7th/8th grade journalism class. Roberts described her student as a “creative, out-of-the-box thinker” who’s always coming up with new ideas to solve problems for herself and others.

“Her heart is so open and caring that just hearing that someone is in need automatically supersedes any of Samantha’s plans or concerns at the moment,” Roberts wrote in her nomination letter. “She is all in, all smiles, and never lets anything stand in her way.”

Since Samantha’s diagnosis in second grade, she has been working with tutors every week to adapt to the challenges of dyslexia, which make reading, spelling and writing difficult.

Samantha said she has become so confident in her abilities she likes to challenge herself by volunteering in class to read passages aloud, something that caused her to stutter uncontrollably a few years ago.

“I like to prove to people that I can do stuff they didn’t think I could,” she said.

Samantha said she was always the “funky one” of Patrick and Nancy Armstrong’s four children. Her siblings loved to devour books as toddlers but she fell asleep whenever she tried to read. It was only later that she realized it wasn’t boredom that made reading difficult.

“When I try to read, the words are moving around and switching places and sometimes I would skip words or whole paragraphs,” she said. “It’s sort of like the words are moving along on a conveyor belt but mine just goes a little slower.”

After her diagnosis, Samantha said she realized quickly that her dyslexia was a gift. Some of the world’s smartest people — like her favorite artist Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein — were believed to have been dyslexic, and they achieved great success.

“I think it makes me work two times harder than everyone else,” she said. “My dad says that everyone else works with 1 percent of their brain but I work with 2 percent.”

One day in Lisa Palacek’s second-grade class at Saint John, Samantha said she broke down in tears trying to describe the traffic jam of words and numbers in her head.

“I told her, ‘I can’t think. There are people living in my brain and there’s been an accident,’ ” Samantha said.

That night at home, she described to her mom how she saw the congestion of her thoughts as if it was a traffic-clogged city in her head.

“It’s like there are two sides of town. Math and spelling is one side of town and the other side is all the creative and artsy stuff you love to do. The math and spelling side is black and white, the other is colorful and rainbows,” she said, explaining that her mind has a hard time getting from one side of town to the other due to slow traffic and accidents.

The Armstrongs encouraged Samantha to write down her ideas and draw pictures about her “brain town,” which she has continued to do off and on for the past five years.

That collection of stories and pictures will be published this spring in “Brain Town,” a 36-page book that’s now in the editing and design stages. They’re planning to market their book through their website braintownbook.com.

In the colorfully illustrated book, Samantha writes about the challenges she faced in school; her techniques for doing homework; her frustrations with her younger siblings (who sometimes correct her spelling mistakes); coping with bullies; her shame over presenting work in class; and how to separate good friends from “frenemies.”

One section of the book, called “Hard Work Highway,” explains her philosophy on her gift.

“People with the gift learn to make the most of the things they are good at,” she writes.

After “Brain Town” is published, Samantha said she’d like to write follow-up books for parents and for teachers. Her top three suggestions for adults?

“My advice is to talk to kids and see what’s going on in their brains,” she said. “And to not always shove work in front of them because it can be overwhelming. But the more you work, the better you get.”